Persuasive Writing on the Holocaust

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Assessed Essay                 Akhil Changani 9E

Persuasive Writing on the Holocaust

My reaction to the Holocaust was devastating. It is one example of bad things happening to good people. The mass murdering of so many Jews is just disgusting and also because it was done for basically no reason. As this was a true event many sources or witnesses are available to express their views, feelings and emotions of themselves and those who survived this terrible tragedy.

I will demonstrate examples of Jews who have survived what they have been through and what they think about God. It is really hard to go through all of this and still believe that God exists. The holocaust should not change our theology on God. It is said to be that the Holocaust was a temporary "Eclipse of God". This is supposed to be when God is away from earth beyond any reason or explanation. People trying to respond to this problem of believing that there is a God after witnessing the terrible event have either succeeded or failed. I will introduce three people who have survived the Holocaust and have tried responding to this problem. The three people included are Primo Levi, Richard Rubenstein and Emil Fackenheim.

I think a big impact on the life of Jews would be their belief in God because many of them have tried responding to this problem and have changed the ways in which they think about him, their views on how good or powerful he is, how they express him and why they still believe in him. I will introduce the problem of evil to the Jews that have survived the Holocaust and their problems of belief. I will also say which of the three Jews the most are convincing to me. The holocaust presents a problem for the Jews and changes their belief in God because now some Jews think “God is Dead”  Their reason to thinking this is because God is supposed to be omnipotent and almighty he could not have let something like this to happen. If there was a God, surely this event would not have taken place. Therefore they think he can’t exist, if these were his qualities. Other Jews believe he is still alive but he was away from earth beyond explanation. A rabbi Rabbinic Judaism has said this has happened because of the sins the Jews did. His quote was “because of our sins we were punished”, I think this is very harsh because Jews are not the only people that can create a sin, even Christians or Indians could be sinners, now the question is why them ?. God is almighty and has unlimited power to do anything so why couldn’t he stop this. These are the questions Jews have in their mind. This has happened because of the problem of evil, not only natural evil but man-made evil. The world’s biggest problem that causes unbalances, prejudice and suffering. A small group of people believe God sent the Nazis to kill these Jews in Germany because the Jews in Europe did not support Zionism enough. Horrific events like this are thought to be the prices of exercising free will and the consequences have been for the Jews to suffer. All the pain and agony was not even thought for by Hitler and some Nazi officials. The holocaust reflects on how poor humanity was at that time. If there were good people like Oscar Schindlers a lot of people wouldn’t have died because if people united against their country it would have been hard to do these types of things i.e. killing or taking the Jews away. Evil was created by God but I don’t think he created it for a bad purpose because he is supposed to create only good and if this was there it had to be for a good reason. If there was no evil we would not be able to discriminate and tell what is good or bad, but this is where the problems comes to exist. The reason why God created evil was to make free will matter otherwise it would really be hard for deciding between the good and evil. The main problems the Holocaust present for the Jews are their beliefs because not everyone can go through an event like this thinking God is still alive. It takes courage to still live believing in God after so much suffering. I think this is bad and a very hard thing to do because many people would just forget the fact that God exist. This makes the Jews feel bad because they had to be killed. I think this is a poor act on Humanity and that many people would agree. Religious people would probably have no luck trying to prove God existed and Normal people would think he did not exist; this is why it creates a problem for the Jews.

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A lot of Jews have tried to respond to this problem and I will investigate about how and what they did to overcome this problem. The people are Richard Rubenstein, Primo Levi and Emil Fackenheim. I will start of with Richard and include all the facts about him and then go on to Primo Levi and in the end Emil.

Richard Rubenstein is a teacher of Religion at a University in Bridgeport. Dr. Rubenstein is his commonly known name. He is a member in the University for Life. He actually studied how to reform Judaism when he was ...

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